  | 
| Xavier Veilhan by The Selby in 2010 | 
Communiqué de la galerie :
Artist Xavier Veilhan has been selected to represent France at 
the 57th Venice Biennale (May 13 - November 26, 2017) with his project Musical Merzbau (working title). Xavier
 Veilhan imagines an overall environment that encompasses the entire 
surface of the pavilion and so altering our perception of it, much in 
the continuity of his former immersive works 
The Studio (1993), 
The Forest and
 The Cave
 (both 1998); an installation in a formal vocabulary borrowed from the 
universe of the recording studio and inspired by Kurt Schwitters’ 
seminal work, the 
Merzbau. Like clearings, a few more 
functional spaces appear for rehearsing, experimenting, mixing or 
recording. Various musicians from all backgrounds are called upon to 
activate the structure and turn it into the ideal arena for their 
creations during the six months of the biennial. In this way 
Musical Merzbau bears witness to Xavier Veilhan’s ongoing development of exhibition platforms like 
The Hyperrealist Project (2003), 
The Glass Wall (2003) or 
Le Baron de Triqueti
 (2006), with which he continually questions the concept of the 
exhibition itself, in his search to somehow extend it. The pavilion 
becomes a place of fusion between contemporary art and music, in the 
framework of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College experiments. 
Xavier
 Veilhan was born in 1963 and lives and works in Paris. Since the 1980s 
he reinvents statuary and develops a multi-shaped approach between 
formal classicism and high technology. He has a long-standing interest 
in the often-evolving exhibition space in which the visitor becomes an 
active participant and is invited to a new reading of his surroundings. 
His numerous works in the public space often respond to the same 
principle. Veilhan cultivates his research with regular musical 
collaborations with artists like Sébastien Tellier, the band Air or 
pioneer composer Eliane Radigue. In 2012 he started developing 
Architectones,
 a series of interventions in seven major modernist buildings around the
 world. His interest for architecture rose to a new level in 2014 when 
he designed the château de Rentilly with architects Bona+Lemercier and 
scenographer Alexis Bertrand. He has directed two films in 2015 that 
prolong these spatial explorations: 
Vent Moderne and 
Matching Numbers. That same year, the double exhibition 
Music
 at Galerie Perrotin, both in New York and in Paris, honored the music 
producers that shape the sound of our time, a project that wholly 
nourished the idea of 
Musical Merzbau and his planned collaborations for the French pavilion. 
In charge of ensuring French representation at the Venice Biennales for contemporary art and architecture, the 
Institut français, agency of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development, is the producer of the French Pavilion alongside the 
French Ministry of Culture and Communication. 
Musical Merzbau is produced by 
ARTER, with the participation of 
We Love Art, the 
Académie de l’Opéra de Paris and 
Cité de la musique | Philharmonie de Paris.
Xavier Veilhan sur Alice au pays des arts :
Veilhan at Hatfield, Promenade 2012
Orchestra, 2011, galerie Perrotin 
Versailles, 2009